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Press Mentions

Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble GloballyThe few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"

NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.”
He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”

BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices“There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”

AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safThe threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."

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BlogBurst

July 30, 2007

Putting the Times in a Lockbox: Protect the Times by taking it private says Business Week's Jon Fine in a column. He figures assets sale of about a billion could defray a $5 billion cost of doing so. Take a look and run your own numbers here.

Pegasus News Sold: Busy summer. In the midst of Murdoch Madness, I missed the sale of Mike Orren's Pegasus News, which I mentioned in this morning's post to TV-station owner Fisher, of Seattle. Well-covered here by Peter Krasilovsky's Local Onliner, here. I've been picking up many signals that local broadcasters are amping up their web efforts -- going competitive for the same advertisers and readers that local newspaper sites thought they could "own". At this point, broadcasters get about 2% of their revenue from online, about a quarter of what local newspapers are getting -- but that gap could close within a couple of years. Taking the Pegasus News approach -- and platform -- is one more step in that direction. (Addendum: More from Pegasus on sale here.)

Twin Cities Layoffs Give Peek in Staff Cutbacks: As the names of those who took the Pioneer Press buyout become public, some have pointed out an interesting phenomenon. While early buyouts took out some of the most senior staff, the new ones also take out younger, though highly experienced people. In addition, librarian positions are becoming obsolescent. While Gannett's turning librarians into database managers -- focused on find and displaying publicly available community data -- most papers' are just buying out or laying off the librarians, an uneconomical "nice to have".

Anyone keeping a total of the number of years of journalistic experience lost this year in buyouts?

In addition, here's further numbers on the decline of reporting strength in the Cities. The Pioneer Press newsroom, which will be down to about 160, post buyouts/layoffs, for now, hit its peak in 2000 at 243.1 FTEs. Even in 1987, the paper had 210 FTEs in the newsroom